Wealthy Green NGOs Versus The Heartland Institute

Willie Soon and David Legates made a presentation in Delaware explaining why they believed  man-made global warming is overblown and illustrated their position by showing the data that belies the alarmist computerized predictions of  CO2-caused  global catastrophe.  How did the major Delaware newspaper cover this? Poorly, because they are in the tank for man-made global warming.  How can you know that,  you are wondering.  The paper’s reporter felt it necessary to make anything that Soon and Legates said suspect by using  “Some environmental groups have pointed to Soon’s and Legates’ ties to organizations financed by fossil fuel and deeply con­servative interests, in­cluding the George C. Marshall and Heartland institutes.”   This is the usual innuendo that greens and their allies in the media use.    They have a dearth of factual data so they make personal attacks.

Actually this piece of untruth was pretty tame compared to that by Juliet  Eilperin of the Washington Post where she embellished the story by putting in the amounts of funding she believed had been given to Marshall and Heartland by Exxon and the Koch Brothers.  But more on this later.

I suppose that you know there are many issue oriented organizations –Non-Government Organizations (NGO)– out there trying to persuade people to their  point of view.  A very large number of them have the mission of persuading you that global warming is a crisis and that unless we stop using fossil fuels, we are dooming the future generations to terrible catastrophes.  Where do they get their money?  Before we try to shed some light on  that  question, lets look at the relative size of the green NGOs  and the George C Marshall and Heartland Institutes.

A partial list* of Green NGOs is tabled below.  The following data are from Charity Navigator  which rates a NGOs using the information supplied by that NGO. The data is for  2012 or the last fiscal year of these organizations. “Program expenses” result from the direct effort to accomplish their mission.  They also have administrative and fund raising expenses which I have not tabled.

Green NGOs                                 Program Exp $K    Assets$K       CEO pay$K

Nature Conservancy                       672,757                      5,180,559           493

World Wildlife Fund                       139,971                         271,695           496

Environmental Defense                   70,755                          137,034          426

Nat. Resc. Defen. Council               76,931                          197,413            381

Sierra Club Foundation                   46,672                            82,622          157

World Resource Inst.                       34,831                            59,902         376

Union of Concerned Scientists     18,029                            29,879           240

Strats for Global Envir                        5,641                               4,945         355

Ctr for American Progress             31,390                             36,626         250

Greenpeace US  **                                 9,601                               9,407         153

subtotal                                               1,106,390

* As a means of approximating the  numbers of the NGOs that are global warming advocates,  we note that more than 700 NGOs  registered to attended COP 17 held in Durban,  South Africa.  See here, here and here.  (h/t to Willis Eschenbach)  Those that attended are just a fraction of the total of all the green NGOs.

**Greenpeace International’s 2011 budget was € 241 million, their program expenditures were €160 million  and it leads 27 regional offices, one of which is Greenpeace US.

Now lets look at what the Charity Navigator has to say about  the  non-green NGOs, George C Marshall and Heartland Institutions and see how they match up with the green NGOs:

George C Marshall                                      342                                   154           24

Heartland                                                   4,008                                  -157         154

subtotal                                                       4,350

The difference is vast.  Can you imagine if you are a green being frightened of these “pipsqueaks” so much that you have to take every opportunity to tell lies about their funding.  That is $1,106,578,000 for programing  versus the $4,350,000 for those fearsome little giants or stated another way, the expenditures for the little giants are 0.4% of the green NGOs.  Note that Heartland is experiencing a deficit.

Earlier I said we would pick up on the  Juliet Eilperin story. She said in a posting that: “The Heartland Institute received more than $7.3 million from Exxon Mobil between 1998 and 2010, and nearly $14.4 million between 1986 and 2010 from foundations affiliated with Charles G. Koch and David H. Koch.”  She had issued a retraction after Joe Bast of Heartland provided the real numbers saying: “ExxonMobil over the course of a decade gave less than a tenth of the amount reported, never amounting to even 5 percent of our annual receipts. The reported level of support from the Kochs was even more egregiously wrong: Except for a gift of $25,000 last year for our work on health care reform, the Kochs hadn’t donated a dime since 1998.”  Also it should be noted that ExxonMobil have not made any contributions to Heartland for the last 7 years.  Why do reporters keep using this innuendo?  Could it be that it is too good to give up even if it is not true?  Or do they not do any research, but rather rely on Alarmist to tell them what to say.

By the way, the Washington Post have closed down their environment desk and have reassign Eilperin to other work.  Did you know that her husband (Andrew Light) is a senior fellow on climate/energy issues at the Center for American Progress (see NGO chart).  Did the Washington Post make this move concerned that there might just be a conflict on interest as she never made her husband’s employment known in her opinion pieces?

Lets get ExxonMobil out of the discussion.   From the ExxonMobil 2011 Corporate Citizenship Report we learn that they are no longer funding anyone that “questions the science of climate change” and that they provided funding to the following advocacy groups and research in 2011:

MIT, Stanford (this is a $100million grant over two years), Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Research Economics and Science, Battelle Pacific Northwestern Laboratory, Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, The Brookings Institution, American Enterprise Institute, Council on Foreign Relations, Resources for the Future, and Center for Strategic and International Studies.

I think that this decision by ExxonMobil was ill advised.  However, fair is fair, so I guess all you who have been saying that a skeptic that took ExxonMobil  money was bought and paid for,  will say that about any Green NGO that takes ExxonMobil  or other fuel supplier’s money.   Can I plan on that?

While taking about the sources of “tainted” money, why is it the Greens go after the Koch Brothers but don’t mention George Soros?    My guess is that because Soros is big source of funding and support for them,  he is off limits.

While the Kochs believe that CO2 is not a major factor causing global warming, it is probably their political positions that most irritate those that deride the Kochs.  The Kochs do support conservative candidates and conservative causes.  But Soros supports political parties too. In fact according to Wiki, Soros spent over thirty million dollars in a failed effort to stop George W Bush from getting a second term.   There is  irony  here in that he is said to have been a major force behind the McCain and Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002. Yet he now is heavily into 527 organizations which can and do spend large amounts of money in political campaigns.  He always supports Democrats.  He contributes heavily to liberal causes according to studies.  He puts money into the Tides Foundations which mainly supports liberal causes and the man-made global warming theory.

There are other things that are not so acceptable.  Soros said in 2006, according to Wiki,””the main obstacle to a stable and just world order is the United States”.  In 2010 he said “Today China has not only a more vigorous economy, but actually a better functioning government than the United States”. He seems to agree with the NY Time economist that a dictator would be a better form of government. Simply stated, I do not believe his political views are shared by the majority of the US population.  See here for additional citations of his philosophy.

This posting shows that the Heartland and Marshall innuendo is bogus.  To be fair,  when warmers speak the media should saying something like this— “The non-radical environmental groups have pointed to So and So ties to organizations financed by fossil fuel and deeply liberal interests, in­cluding the Worldwide Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace.”  My preference is that media people don’t use these ad hominum attacks because as I have shown, the attacks are neither fair nor truthful.  The use of these attacks only serve to show the media’s ignorance bias.

And we have not touched upon the Government funding which is even larger and perhaps even more imbalanced in the warmers favor.

And we have not  shown how the NGOs operate to influence legislation, and the popular opinion.

More to come.

cbdakota